UP IN ARMS!
(…never mind assault guns…give me a hogleg .44 any day)

The Newtown slaughter of innocents just before Christmas seems to have sparked the opposite effect we would have expected to result from such a horrendous act of Herodian dimensions.

But instead of generating a mass revulsion against the continuing insanity of allowing military assault type weapons to be freely available to anyone with the means to buy one, we have the spectacle of our citizenry stampeding to the nearest gun shop or show in a frenzy to possess one of these.

Have we Americans gone…amok?

Our –Second Amendment-  was conceived by our founders as a practical way in their time to create armed, and well regulated, local militias to be called out in case of need. Thus, the right of the citizenry to keep and bear arms was a shrewdly economic means for doing so, at little or no cost to the newly created Federal government, whose treasury at the time was not exactly flush.

There were also collateral considerations of the need for folks to be able to hunt for game as a means of supplementing whatever food supply they might have (keeping in mind there were no supermarkets back then, and almost everyone had to grow their own…if they could). Further, since there also wasn’t the system of law enforcement we have today, self-defense from marauding wild-life or human miscreants of one kind or another made perfect sense in the societal ideal of the day, that is, self-reliance.

In the context of our society today, however, much of these considerations no longer apply as they once did. Those early militias evolved into our National Guards which, while similar in many respects to their ancestors, are now armed and equipped by both State and Federal government, not the individual citizens.

And while self-defense is still a serious matter of concern, especially these days, our laws about that today are very, very iffy, and any citizens acting so can find themselves hauled into court to answer for exercising that right…regardless of the circumstances. So, why need semi-automatic or even a full automatic weapons for that purpose, when a trusty .44 hogleg with a single well-placed shot can do the job just as well as a hail storm of bullets, and with the less likely possibility of legal hassles besides? And less we forget, it wasn’t in the so long ago of our frontier days that those who best survived were not those who were faster on the draw…but those who were better practiced for the accuracy of their fire.

There have been, and still are, a number of laws in force against weapons capable of firing in full automatic mode, such as machine guns, etc. Machine pistols and assault weapons should all be in that category, and if they are not included in that category…they should be.

Yet, if we really think about gun violence in our society today it has less to do with the ready availability of these, or even their type, than with an apparent twisted mindset in today’s society which seems fixated on resolving conflicts or frustrations by blazing away  at anyone or anything perceived as offering the slightest provocation. That’s the root cause of most of these events, not the guns themselves.

Unfortunately, our emotional reaction to such deadly events, such as Columbine, University of Virginia, and now Newtown, misdirects our focus from that aspect of the problem. And neither the NRA nor the Anti-gun lobbies contribute anything helpful to any discussions about how to prevent such events from happening. Second Amendment purists categorically reject any common sense considerations to help resolve such issues. Anti-gun abolitionists, on the other hand, just as adamantly rant for complete prohibition, apparently ignoring the historical lessons of such an approach.

We could resolve all of that by simply following what the Constitution provides for, which is, to take advantage of the emotional climate resulting from this latest gun violence event, and try to pass another amendment to it, this one specifically banning such high volume lethality from civilian hands, reserving these strictly for our armed forces. While it might not put a stop to gun-violence altogether, it would reduce it to a less mass killing effect. Doing so would also eliminate most of these never-ending and useless pro and con arguments about the issue. Of course, getting both the Congress and the State Legislatures to ratify such an amendment is questionable. But since everyone is so fired up about it because of Newtown, it could just happen.

There is, of course, no way of predicting when anyone with mental problems of some sort will go off the rails, but without the availability of such weapons, whatever psychotic rampages they might act out would have much less deadly effects. Even so, common sense should guide us when faced with having such an individual on our hands. Had the parent of the young man who caused all that terrible mayhem in Newtown done so, she would never have kept such weaponry at home, even under lock and key. That error of judgment cost her…her life…and those of many innocents besides.

We are thus left…up in arms!

CENTURION